YOUR CRETINOUS POST 9/11 MOVIE REVIEW OF THE DAY: And I only know about because it comes from my local paper, the Inquirer. Carrie Rickey judges The Powerpuff Girls movie harshly because --git this-- the girls actually save skyscrapers from being knocked down. And in our new everything's-changed world, that just can't happen:

What once was the joke of The Powerpuff Girls is now its jinx. Mine is probably not the only first-grade Girls fan to tell Mom and Dad that she won't see the Powerpuffs on the big screen because she doesn't "want to see tall buildings fall."

You see, the Girls test their superpowers in the laboratory of Townsville, where they inadvertently topple skyscrapers while protecting the populace from urban terrorists such as the mutant monkey Mojo Jojo. ("Gorilla warfare," in the film's clever pun.)

Through Sept. 10, Powerpuff mischief cracked us up. Now it makes us cringe. What do you say to a 5-year-old who asks why the mayor didn't call the Powerpuffs to save the World Trade Towers?

So superheroes can't save the world anymore because they fail to prevent disasters on our actual planet Earth. I mean, come on. They never did that and nobody complained. Nobody who actually liked the superhero idea, anyway.

By the way, has anyone been reading superhero comics up through 9/11? How did Marvel and DC deal with it? In the Marvel universe it's a little more plausible that the terrorist strike could have happened --the Fantastic Four was in the Negative Zone or something, the Avengers were fighting on the Blue Area of the Moon, while Daredevil felt it all happen, unable to stop it. I picture somebody consoling Captain America, saying "You can't save everyone, Cap." In the DCU it's much less likely, what with their near-omnipotent heroes, so maybe the Towers still stand there. It's weird thinking of these continuities this way; their editorial teams usually plan out disasters to drive up sales and add drama and what-have-you, but when one actually happens to us, it doesn't belong in the comic-book world --it has no intent behind it, no narrative drive. So it would not surprise me if the World Trade Center still existed in the two major continuities, and that their keepers would try to reflect 9/11 in a different way, in the same way the superhero stories have always reflected the world around us, with conflicts and destruction greater than our own, but also more understandable than our own. But I haven't been reading Justice League in a while so I don't know how they handled it.